Winter Warmer is VTUG’s flagship event that brings together over a thousand IT professionals, dozens of vendors and VARs, and technology experts on virtualization, VDI, storage, data protection and security. Winter Warmer brings you technical presentations, hands-on labs, insightful keynotes, approximately 60 exhibitors and much more. We are launching a professional growth track that includes how to develop and conduct presentations to one or one thousand people. Winter Warmer is taking place at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, MA on January 17, 2013. This event is free to all IT professionals! But we have limited availability so register as soon as possible so you can be a part of Winter Warmer.

Winter and cold weather is upon us which means Winter Warmer is approaching. Last Year’s Winter Warmer was a huge success with over 1000 attendees but this year, they want it to be even bigger! So, the same great location (Gillette Stadium) with the same great leaders (VTUG) but 2013 Winter Warmer is NEW and EVEN BETTER!

Speaker: Chris Colotti and Thomas Kraus will round things out with Virtualized Networks and what they mean for your future.

12:00 p.m. Lunch – West Side

All day labs

IDEXX Virtualizing Exchange best practices

Microsoft Hands On Labs – See Below

Keynotes for January Winter Warmer:

The Winter Warmer this year is focused on “HOW-TO” and getting things done virtualizing desktops, servers, databases and networks.
We have also delivered on a promise to our members to provide insights to VMware, Microsoft and Citrix platforms to help you learn more about the leaders in virtualization.

Here are just some of the valuable presentations you will be able to attend:

Hans Bernhardt, Senior SE for VMware is breathing life into continued virtualization. In this session you will learn what you need to optimize your virtualization environment and at the same time be prepared on moving to private or public cloud automation if and when you are ready.

Todd Smith, New England SE manager for Citrix will be presenting on the best practices and pitfalls for virtualizing desktops.

Mike Corey, @Michael_Corey founder and CEO of Ntirety and Jeff Szastak a Staff Systems Engineer for VMware, will speak to Virtualizing SQL 2012: Doing IT Right. This was a blow out presentation at VMworld and will give you the opportunity to ask even more questions.

Dan Stolts @ITProGuru and Jeff Woosley will take over center stage at 10 AM. Dan & Jeff will have a truly technical deep dive of the Microsoft Stack for virtualization. Free Download of Windows Server 2012 from http://aka.ms/getWin2012. Play with it and bring your tough questions.

Wrapping the morning up will be Chris Colotti, @ccolotti who is a consulting architect with the VMware Center of Excellence and Thomas Kraus who is is an Enterprise Architect within the Center of Excellence at VMware . Chris and Thomas will enlighten you on the next big wave in virtualization, Network Virtualization (aka vCNS Nicira), and how you can be prepared to take advantage of it.

Register for a free Azure Account and you can create machines and remote into these online machines to do labs (Hyper-V labs not available on azure) [Azure account requires credit card but you will not be charged until you “manually” change your account from a test to a production account!]

Setup real servers in your office and configure remote control so you can work on your real servers via RDP

we MAY have access to a few online servers (10) during the event in case someone does not have a laptop that supports Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V

Lab Option 2: Observe Others and listen to step by step instructions by the instructor

Come without a laptop look over someone else’s shoulder

Downloadable Step-By-Step Hands on Lab Guides will be made available for all attendees so you can walk through the labs whenever you like

Installing Windows Server 2012 Dual Boot 2 VHD

Enable Hyper-V

Run Windows Server 2012 in “Laptop Mode”

Create Virtual Machines on Hyper-V

Create Virtual Switch on Hyper-V

Configure Guest Networking

Create Domain (Hint: DCPromo no longer exists)

Join Computer to domain

Configure Firewall

Configure Storage Spaces

Configure Storage Deduplication

Configure Thin Provisioned Storage (on guest OR HOST)

Configure Hyper-V Replica (requires two hosts)

Configure Shared Nothing Live Migration (Requires two hosts)

Guest Clustering (maybe ???)

More???

To participate in the hands-on lab session, you will need to bring your own computer (laptop preferred) with the following minimum configuration:

If you are not running Windows Server 2012 already you will need to download additional required lab files here(Only file needed is AutoBootVHD8.ZIP) If you do not have at least 60 GB of free hard drive space, also download Server2012RTM.zip)